


Sugar and Gold

by domo (aroceu)



Series: Generosity [6]
Category: Super Junior
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-28
Updated: 2010-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:32:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aroceu/pseuds/domo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was sweet and warm, his voice rich like honey and his eyes like the night. But Jongwoon couldn't give himself to fall into those eyes forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar and Gold

**Author's Note:**

> For Pi

The gold liquid spurts out of the bottle and lands on Jongwoon’s toast. He sticks his tongue out to the side as he squeezes it a little more until another drop falls on the bread, once again.

“Hyung! Don’t waste all the honey!” says his little brother from across the table. “I want some!”

Jongwoon laughs to Jongjin who is bouncing in his seat.

“It’s plenty full,” he says, handing the bottle over. “Here it is.”

He lifts up his toast and bites into the bread, and the sweetness of the honey plays with his lips.

\--

Jongwoon enters his new school on the second day of October. He is nervous because he hears the school is elite and prestigious and the kids are competitive and tough and the teachers are strict and apathetic. Jongwoon had always been used to a school with soft, easygoing classmates and teachers who were always there to guide you and hold your hand.

In his second class he isn’t been paying much attention (after all, who can pay attention in Physics?) when suddenly he feels a tap at his shoulder. He looks up to see a boy with pale skin and cherry lips and eyes as black as the night. The boy’s uniform indicates that he is a few years below Jongwoon.

“Here,” he says to Jongwoon, sticking his hand out. Between his long, nimble fingers is one of Jongwoon’s notebooks. “I think you dropped this in the hall.”

Jongwoon notices how the boy’s voice is rich, is rich like honey.

\--

He calls him his first friend, but Kyuhyun (as the boy’s name turns out to be) laughs and reassures him that he will probably make many more friends.

“Why did you move here?” Kyuhyun asks as they walk through the courtyards during a free period.

Jongwoon turns to Kyuhyun and smiles, because his voice is like the strings of a violin finally finding their right key. “My father had to change jobs, so we just went along with him.”

“Ah.” Kyuhyun continues staring at his feet, though there’s something in the way he walks that tells Jongwoon that there are more interesting things that he could be looking at.

Jongwoon’s gaze lingers on the younger boy. “What about you?”

Kyuhyun turns to him. “Hmm?”

“Have you lived here your whole life?”

“Oh. Yes,” Kyuhyun replies. “I have. But I’d love to go out and explore the world. See new things, meet new people, take on new experiences. It all seems so thrilling and different, doesn’t it?”

Jongwoon wonders what it would be like to be Kyuhyun, what it would like to be inside Kyuhyun’s mind and heart, what it would be like to be in his life.

“Yes. Yes it would.”

\--

“This is my brother,” Jongwoon introduces when he takes Kyuhyun home for the first time.

Jongjin looks up from the ground in the family room and smiles when he sees Kyuhyun.

“Hi! I’m Jongjin!” he says happily, waving.

“Jongjin-ah, I’m Kyuhyun.” Kyuhyun bows to Jongjin, even though Jongjin seems miles and miles away from Kyuhyun’s height.

Jongjin giggles and turns to Jongwoon. “I like him, hyung,” he says to him. “He’s polite and pretty.”

Jongwoon blushes and reaches over to tap his brother lightly. “Don’t call other boys pretty,” he mutters, cheeks flushed in embarrassment. “It’s weird.”

“But it’s true!”

Beyond Jongjin’s bright smile, Jongwoon knows that he agrees with him, and he knows that it’s true.

\--

“You value your brother a lot?” Kyuhyun looks up from the dice that they’re playing and eyes Jongwoon, mystery and amusement clouding in his pupils.

Jongwoon nods and smiles. “He’s my little brother; I love him,” he tells Kyuhyun. “No matter what he does, I’ll always love him.”

“He is blessed to have a brother like you,” Kyuhyun says, sending a smile that can light up the darkest night, the darkest night of his eyes.

Jongwoon turns pink but doesn’t say anything.

\--

They’re running around in a field in an afternoon, shortly after school had let out. Kyuhyun has a water gun in his hand and he’s chasing Jongwoon, who has a water gun as well but it’s empty.

“Jongwoon, Jongwoon, I’m coming to get you!” Kyuhyun shouts while laughing, doing his best to aim.

Jongwoon attempts to duck and avoid the water that’s being sprayed at him, and makes sure he doesn’t slip on the grass. “Aish, Kyuhyunnie!”

“I’m going to get you!” Kyuhyun dives and tackles Jongwoon to the ground, his arms flying across Jongwoon’s torso, and Jongwoon falls and lands on the soft, bright green grass beneath them. Water gets squirted into his face, and Jongwoon shrieks and tries to bat Kyuhyun’s gun away.

“Kyuhyunnie!” he cries out again, and Kyuhyun just cackles with joy at the victory of taking over his hyung.

Jongwoon looks up to Kyuhyun sitting on top of him. When the excitement finally wears out, though only for a little bit and not quite worn down, he asks Kyuhyun, who is still panting slightly, “Why don’t you ever use honorifics?”

Kyuhyun laughs and looks down at Jongwoon. “Oh! You want me to call you  _hyung_  now?” He chuckles. “Because I see no need if we’re good friends already.”

Jongwoon takes this logic into consideration and decides that it makes some sense.

\--

“Pass me the honey,” Kyuhyun says after a sleepover at Jongwoon’s house.

Jongwoon passes him the honey bottle, and makes sure that Jongjin doesn’t drip any jam onto his good shirt.

“Wow, you have so much honey left,” Kyuhyun chuckles as he sets the plastic bottle back down. He eyes it for a moment. “Do you not use it that much?”

“Are you kidding?” says Jongwoon’s mother from the side, looking at the boys. “They love it so much that I have to buy bottles at a time!”

Jongwoon watches as Kyuhyun smiles at this statement.

“Yes,” he says. “I like honey a lot too.”

\--

Kyuhyun kisses Jongwoon for the first time in the beginning of their next year in school, when summer is over but it isn’t quite autumn yet. The kiss feels like the wind pushing against his lips, not too hard but softly, gently, firmly.

Jongwoon kisses back with a little bit more vigor, and can feel Kyuhyun’s smile against his lips. His lips are warm and his teeth taste like honey.

\--

Kyuhyun pushes Jongwoon’s hair back as they walk under the street lights. Cars pass by and the neon from the nearby stores glow onto Kyuhyun’s pale face, but his smile shimmers brighter than all of them.

“I never thought about it,” Kyuhyun says, “but your mouth makes you look so much more prettier than you’d think.”

“Are you saying that you don’t think I look pretty already?” Jongwoon asks teasingly. He knocks his shoulder into the other’s.

Kyuhyun laughs and shakes his head. “You’re pretty already, Jongwoon,” he tells him. “But the way you smile, the way you speak, the way you sing, it makes it all so much better.”

Jongwoon thinks about how he’s already realized this, because it’s even more true with Kyuhyun. And he thinks about how Kyuhyun smiles at him and he knows smiles are supposed to be  _special_ , but he’s never seen a smile more real than Kyuhyun’s.

\--

It’s the rhythm of life, Jongwoon realizes, as they go on with high school. He goes to classes and takes exams (mediocre grades, though he’s okay with this, surprisingly) and hangs out with his friends. He meets Kyuhyun between each class and they share the sweetest kisses for brief seconds, and they’re enough for him to last for two more hours. Kyuhyun’s lips are like sugar, small grains left upon his lips and Jongwoon wants to lick them up and swallow them, feel the warmth of the freshly ground sugar trickle down his throat.

When Jongwoon graduates from school, he goes to a university not far away so he can visit Kyuhyun. When Kyuhyun graduates from school, he goes to a university right next to Jongwoon’s, but not quite exactly the same—“Because their computer engineering program isn’t as good,” Kyuhyun says to Jongwoon with a smirk, and Jongwoon just sticks his tongue out. They can see each other every day, and Jongwoon has never known life to be this sweet.

\--

“I want the honey,” Kyuhyun says as he watches Jongwoon squirt the golden liquid onto his bread.

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Jongwoon says with a laugh.

He squeezes the honey until the bottle is half full, but it had been half empty already.

“We can never have breakfast together if we’re going to fight over a condiment like this,” Kyuhyun chuckles as he takes the bottle from Jongwoon’s hands.

Jongwoon smiles as well, and thinks of the honey as more than just a condiment.

\--

Jongwoon gets the call when he’s running late for classes and he’s in the middle of the streets, having just kissed Kyuhyun good-bye when his cellphone suddenly vibrates in his jacket pocket.

“Yobeosayo?” he says into his phone, not really paying attention because he doesn’t want his professor to yell at him for being late,  _again_.

The sound of his mother sobbing on the other end finally catches his ear, however, and then the words speak to him.

“Y-Your brother, he’s gone.”

Jongwoon isn’t quite sure that he’s heard the words right.

“What?”

His mother chokes. “Jongjin, he’s gone.”

\--

Jongwoon goes to his brother’s funeral, though it feels like he’s coming home to say hi. When he steps into the church, he feels refreshed, renewed, like he’s just stepped out of the shower—though he’s not, he’s at a fucking  _funeral_. He sits down in the pews and wonders who the hell these people are.

“He was a brother, a son, a friend, a student, a classmate—and most of all, he was Kim Jongjin, dear to each and every one of us.”

Jongwoon looks around and sees people crying and nodding and wonders if he should cry and nod. But nothing falls from his eyes and he can’t bring himself to agree to these words spoken by a stranger.

“Let us now bow our heads in prayer and hope that he is doing well in heaven, that he is looking down upon Earth. May he rest in peace.”

Jongwoon wonders how he can believe in a god who has let this happen. His heart is weighing down, thick, threatening to fall.

\--

“Are you all right?” Kyuhyun asks when Jongwoon comes home.

Jongwoon nods numbly; he doesn’t know how to speak.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Kyuhyun’s dark eyes are open, honest.

Jongwoon looks at him and shakes his head. He kind of wants to fuck.

“Do you…?” Kyuhyun hesitates and trails off and stares at Jongwoon. “What do you want?”

As a last refuge, Jongwoon just bows and buries his head into Kyuhyun’s shirt. Kyuhyun’s left hand comes up and he strokes his hair. He lets out a sigh, like a breeze and Jongwoon wants to drift away in it.

\--

Jongwoon knows that this isn’t working out because when he looks at Kyuhyun again, all he sees is the mysterious, pale, beautiful boy that he’s learned to know for so long, and he doesn’t know if he can stand to see it go, to know that he will one day go away and there will be nothing left anymore.

When Kyuhyun kisses him again, Jongwoon thinks about the way their naked bodies are pressed against each other, that he can feel every inch and centimeter of Kyuhyun, and how he’s so warm and comforting and only wants to make Jongwoon happy.

Jongwoon thinks about how he can’t stand it, because Kyuhyun is like a bee and one sting and he’s gone.

\--

“Pass me the honey.” Kyuhyun’s voice is quiet and strained, and his cheeks are hollow and pale.

Jongwoon doesn’t look up at Kyuhyun as he sends Kyuhyun the bottle, because he knows his throat is sore from the most recent fight they’ve had.

He doesn’t look up as he eats his toast, and the sugar from the honey is stale and dull and taunting, and he’s so used to it, he’s so sick and tired of it.

Jongwoon doesn’t look up as the last drop of honey falls from the bottle.

\--

He’s not surprised when Kyuhyun tells him he’s moving, he’s moving away, he’s moving far, far away. He’s surprised that Kyuhyun has even bothered to tell him anyways.

He’s not surprised that the last thing that Kyuhyun tells him is that he’s changed, and that Kyuhyun just wants to make him happy but if he’s going to keep pushing him away like this, then fine.

Jongwoon throws away the slip of paper with a phone number and an address on it, the slip of paper that Kyuhyun had given him. He tosses it into the trash can and looks out his apartment window and wonders where his life is going now.

He’s run out of honey.

\--

Five years later, he’s a successful businessman, after having given up on his dreams to be a musician. He goes to meetings and wears a stiff, black suit and meets other men who wear stiff, black suits. He masturbates three times a day and lives in an apartment by himself on the edge of town, and other than going to work, hardly leaves his home because he’s too busy working or staring up at the ceiling on his monochromic bed, wondering where his heart has gone (and if he’s ever had one at all.)

His mother calls him and tells him to visit, but she leaves out the fact that she’s moved out of their old house. Jongwoon doesn’t realize this until he goes to their old house and sees that it’s empty.

He walks in and his hard shoes clang against the wooden floor, echoing throughout. Dust lingers in the air, and everything smells old, abandoned, with a bitter aftertaste. Jongwoon wonders if his childhood is in here, and the chuckle that comes out of his lips is unfamiliar.

He looks around the living room and the bedrooms and the dining room. When he comes to the kitchen, he sees the place where their refrigerator used to be, and he sees counters lined with age-old dirt. He traces a hand over them, and the grime stays on his fingertips.

Jongwoon finally makes his way to the pantry. Sitting on the top shelf is a single bottle of honey, forgotten and empty.


End file.
